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The Society:
From Birth to Maturity
page
4
Introduction
SAA Membership
SAA Leadership (Council & Officers)
Research and Publication
Annual Meeting Analysis
Financial Profile
Presidential Perspective
SAA in a Comparative Context
End Notes
Research
and Publication
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The Society's growth and change can be traced as well through its major publication--the
American Archivist--during this fifty-year period. In 1940, its editorial
board consisted of only five members, one of whom was a woman. As late as 1965,
there were no women on the board. By 1990, however, the board had expanded to
fourteen members--over 40 percent women. The kinds of institutions represented
on the board also changed, but less dramatically. In 1940, for instance, the
board was split evenly between college and university archives and state libraries/archives.
Fifty years later, 43 percent of the board members came from academic institutions,
followed by 36 percent from state historical societies or archives, with the
remainder from national archives, including one from Canada.
The number and
kinds of articles also reflected a changing research agenda, one in which women
made an increasing contribution. The American Archivist of 1940 was a
modest volume of less than three hundred pages and included only eighteen articles,
83 percent written by men. By 1965, the journal had more than doubled in length
and carried more than twice as many articles; of those forty-two articles, a
quarter were written by women. Again, the most dramatic shift occurred between
then and 1990, when the American Archivist ran to 726 pages with forty-six
articles, nearly half of which were written by women.13
During those same years, the journal moved to a double-column format (1979),
increasing the density of text per page.
Categorizing
the types of articles that appeared in the journal over this same period presents
a greater challenge. In 1940, the journal regularly carried extensive international
bibliographies of archival publications. The remaining articles reflected no
dominant topic. By 1965, there were enough articles in the volume to detect
some areas of emphasis, including preservation (6), oral history (4), religious
archives (3), and records management (3). As a genre, case studies appeared
frequently (6), describing how a particular institution dealt with a specific
issue. International articles also appeared regularly. Twenty-five years later,
the case study approach and the international scene continued to be important
parts of the journal. Using the 1990 volume of the journal as a indicator of
a substantial shift in archival research, however, would be misleading, since
one issue was devoted to archival descriptive standards (11 articles), and a
second issue focused on preservation (13 articles). Even so, it is safe to assert
that, at the beginning of the 1990s, creating and adopting descriptive standards
increasingly helped to integrate archival intellectual control into the larger
world of library cataloging standards, made easier by electronic technology.
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